An amuse-bouche list of ten movies to delight your cinema pallet and broaden your figurative horizons from within the confines of your home.
The Criterion Channel is the streaming library that surmounts the will-this-be-good gamble, by offering the best cinema from anytime or anywhere. If that sounds daunting, here’s an easy selection to give you the confidence to avail yourself of their 14-day free trial.
(titles listed in alphabetical order)
The Big Heat
Post-war American crime movies were so dark, the French coined the term film noir to describe them. There’s none so hardboiled brutal as this crackerjack thriller with famed bad girl Gloria Grahame playing the femme fatale.
Find it HERE.
Death of a Cyclist
No better way to honor the memory of Italian beauty Lucia Bosè (recently deceased from Covid-19 complications) than to self-isolate while watching her performance as a haunted woman, running from the consequences of a secret sin, in the Spanish crime drama Muerte de un ciclista. You will wonder why you’ve never heard of this movie before.
Find it HERE.
Le Grand Amour
One of the benefits of supporting Criterion is knowing your money helps to rescue lost art. The films of director Pierre Étaix were off-limits for nearly four decades, now you can stream them in comfort and watch an ingenious clown of celluloid who inspired comics as disparate as Woody Allen, Jerry Lewis, & Terry Gilliam.
Find it HERE.
His Girl Friday
A madcap riot of a comedy – it starts at a dizzying rhythm that doesn’t stop till days after you’ve finished the film. It is easy to see why Quentin Tarantino puts the movie in his top ten – the scintillating pace of His Girl Friday is in his bloodstream as it is in his own oeuvre. Such an alignment of cast, screenplay, and director may never come again. Cinematic lightning-in-a-bottle.
Find it HERE.
In the Mood for Love
Wong Kar Wai’s saturated drama gives meaning to the cliche “every frame a painting.” And, this isn’t empty eye-candy, but a film that aches with longing and kindles a yearning few movies ever accomplish.
Find it HERE.
Metropolis
A Criterion sampler would be incomplete without a title from the pure-cinema days of silent film. With only images at its disposal, Metropolis is an expressionist experience in world-weaving. These towering futuristic sets came long before those in Star Wars or Blade Runner – and Metropolis outstrips both those classics when it comes to striking sci-fi melodrama.
Find it HERE.
Metropolitan
Teenage angst as seen through a singularly chatty lense – some glibly call it The Breakfast Club with a college degree, but it stands apart as a witty, keen, & perceptive gem of youthful posturing we cannot help but recognize.
Find it HERE.
The Red Shoes
Half fairytale, half phantasmagoria – a deluge of technicolor madness. Darren Aronfsky called his version Black Swan, Martin Scorsese called his Raging Bull, and Incredibles director Brad Bird calls The Red Shoes a masterpiece “impossible to categorize – you just have to see it.”
Find it HERE.
Seven Samurai
Director Akira Kurosawa was the seminal master of epic film. If the long runtime of Seven Samurai has frightened you off in the past, now is the time to repent and partake. You will find the film grips you till its finish with no effort on your part.
Find it HERE.
Le Trou
Etched from improbable real-life events, this intricate escape caper isn’t like the many other jailbreak films you’ve seen. At once tensely styled and realistically relaxed, this is a movie Hollywood would never give you. A dragon you will chase through many genres and eras of film history.
Find it HERE.
